


Have you departed, every one

by bookoftheazuresky



Series: star followed star [9]
Category: The Transformers (IDW Generation One), Transformers - All Media Types
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Canon-Typical Violence, Gen, Ghosts, Implied/Referenced Abuse, Near Death Experiences, Past Character Death, Serious Injuries, Vomiting
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-06
Updated: 2019-02-06
Packaged: 2019-10-23 04:44:00
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,195
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17676686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bookoftheazuresky/pseuds/bookoftheazuresky
Summary: When you touch the edge of the Well, you just might meet old ghosts.





	Have you departed, every one

**Author's Note:**

> I really, really wanted to write the fic where Sunstorm and Starscream meet in this ‘verse, but I told myself it was too self-indulgent. Then I was like, I am writing the fantasy that Megatron gets the consequences of his actions in person form, I can write whatever I damn want.

“Sunshine, don’t do this to me,” Skywarp whispered, thin and high. Energon was splattered lividly over his black and purple plating. “Don’t- oh Primus, TC, don’t do this to _us_ -“

Flatline didn’t even look up, just made a sharp gesture in his direction. Sleetknife, a pale sharp-winged seeker Sunstorm’s age, hauled him back from the repair table. Pale claws left stinging silver trails in Skywarp’s paintjob as the younger seeker struggled, words tumbling over each other in an effort to get him to listen and be still. It was just a stream of white noise until the junior seeker gave up and yelled for his trinemate and Frostreaver’s outlier ability _forced_ him to silent stillness.

It had been Primus-damned _Whirl_ , who didn’t care if he was committing suicide throwing himself into that fight. The fragging _Wreckers_. Skywarp hadn’t even gotten to make them pay for it, he’d had to get Sunstorm to the medics right away. _Why_ did this have to happen when TC was away?

A keen wanted to claw from his vocalizer, but Frostreaver’s power didn’t even allow him that relief. The shock of it had given him just enough awareness to know that trying to teleport over to the energon-soaked repair table was a bad idea.

He looked- Sunstorm looked, lying limp with his entire front a lurid fuschia and silver ruin-

Skywarp’s internals twisted with savage nausea. “Frost,” Sleetknife said sharply, optics fixed on Skywarp’s face.

The paralysis vanished just in time for Skywarp to retch up everything that was left in his fuel tank.

~

Sunstorm went from blackness to full consciousness in under an astrosecond. It was almost as disorienting as waking up from the mixture of euphorics and painkillers that outliers got so that they wouldn’t kill things by accident. There was no transition to functioning, just a shock like his processor had glitched into awareness.

He was sitting on the edge of a ship’s viewport looking out into space. He could see a planet far below, swirls of white clouds over a white surface marked with vertebra of slate gray. A moon hovered at the other edge of the view in the same orbit as the ship, ragged and cracked nearly through.

“Carcharias,” Sunstorm murmured. He’d only seen the planet he was created on once from orbit like this: in the _Interdictor_ on his way to be delivered to Megatron, after Shockwave had pronounced him a success. The base complex and lab had been shut down about ten vorns afterwards when the easily accessible mines had run dry, and was now only memorialized in the designations of the MTOs built there.

“Depressing little iceball,” commented a harsh voice from behind him. His wing rapped painfully on the viewport as he stiffened and jerked around.

His first thought was _I don’t know a seeker with those colors_. White-red-blue was usually an Autobot color scheme, and most seekers were a single or bicolor with accents, not real tricolors. Then second-hand memory files snapped into place, still colored with Thundercracker’s pain.

“Star,” Sunstorm breathed.

Starscream raised his brows judgmentally, and Sunstorm flushed hotly and corrected himself. “Starscream.”

“Someone has been talking to Thundercracker, I see,” Starscream said dryly.

“Yes. Well.” Rather than keep looking at the other seeker, Sunstorm took in the surroundings. It swiftly quenched the remaining burn of embarrassment and replaced it with swiftly-rising anxiety. The planet below, the familiar ship, the seeker watching him with expectant optics and a not-entirely-pleasant crook of his lips…the fight, the Wreckers he had killed, and then the heavily armored helicopter-alt that had literally _slammed_ into him mid-flight. Warbuild helicopters outweighed seekers by as much as ten tons, depending on both parties’ alts. Getting hit like that…

Sunstorm found himself on his pedes with no memory of intervening motion. “I can’t be dead, I have work to do!”

A beat, and Starscream clapped a hand to his face and laughed until his vents rattled. Sunstorm irrelevantly wondered if the difference in their voices was spark-related, the result of old damage on Starscream’s part, or Shockwave’s version of color commentary. It was better than the other thoughts and feelings vying for space in his processor and spark.

Recovering, Starscream wiped traces of optical fluid off of his face. “Do you really think _that_ matters?”

Sunstorm bit his glossa rather than reply, tasting energon. He was going to start crying soon, it was inevitable. He had so many people _counting_ on him-

“And you’re not quite dead yet,” Starscream informed him, snipping off that processor thread. “Who knows, you might even survive the cracked spark chamber. Skywarp was very quick, getting you to a medic.” The last was filled with a brittle bitterness that Sunstorm had no difficulty identifying as jealousy.

Not dead yet. The vice around his spark eased. Sunstorm touched the glass of his cockpit over it, feeling it pulse. If it wasn’t for the scene straight out of his first memory files and the dead seeker, he would have taken this for reality. He felt like he was within his normal functioning parameters. “What is this, then? A hallucination? A memory purge?”

Red-striped wings flicked in a shrug. “What’s the edge of the Well, but a hallucination if you get back?”

When he put it that way… “Right. That makes sense.” And if it was just the work of a traumatized processor, he didn’t lose anything by treating it as real.

“You’re _really_ like this.” Sunstorm glanced up. Starscream was regarding him with a mixture of bafflement and disapproval, arms crossed over his cockpit.

“Like what?” Sunstorm asked warily. If Starscream said ‘an idiot’ then he wasn’t sure how he was going to argue otherwise, he wasn’t doing so well right now.

“This!” Starscream waved at him. At Sunstorm’s incomprehension, he hissed and said, “Sincere! It’s like you’re begging for someone to take advantage of you!”

“I do not think sincerity or the lack of it would have stopped me from being taken advantage of.” Sunstorm paused, considering, but continued, “As you would be in the best position to understand.”

He’d surprised the mech, he could tell. “That’s…complicated,” Starscream said, after a moment, looking aside.

“No,” Sunstorm replied. “It is not.”

Starscream flicked crimson optics at him. “I suppose it isn’t,” he allowed.

Wings tilted down, chin dipped, hands curled- he looked, for a moment, small. Sunstorm knew the feeling intimately. Megatron wanted to be the center of a person’s world, to dominate their attention, fill their thoughts. Everything had to be on his terms, whether it was pleasure or pain. Because he was Right, and therefore whatever he did was also Right. And if he had to push someone down, to make them dependent on him, to put them in their place, that was just proof that he was superior in the end.

Sunstorm fought him by refusing to fight. By denying him the attention he craved. He planted his heels and kept his wings high and did not let Megatron looming make him cringe. A sun shone in splendid isolation, uncaring of the void around it, and Megatron was not going to pull him down. But he had also been fortunate, where Starscream had not.

“Skywarp and Thundercracker miss you.”

Starscream scoffed, his wings returning to a neutral cant. “Please refrain from aiming that sincerity at me. Anyone could tell you it’s a bad idea.”

“I’m not interested in the opinions of ‘anyone.’” Now Sunstorm drew himself up, speaking with the confidence of a Decepticon commander but foregoing some of his usual formality. “They are, so very often, fools.” He softened his voice slightly, but remained firm. “They loved you. I am sorry it turned out so wrong.”

Starscream stepped to the side, tapping talons on the viewport glass and looking at him sidelong. It was still that sharp, evaluating gaze; a judgment on his worthiness. He’d seen it before on other senior officers. Despite the lack of real-world consequences, he _wanted_ to meet this challenge- no one was ever going to understand him quite like this mech could. “If it hadn’t, you wouldn’t have been created.”

“Perhaps that would have been for the best.” Sunstorm leaned back on the viewport, optics on the ice-white world far below for a moment before returning to his companion.

Starscream smiled thinly. Like most of his expressions that Sunstorm had seen, it had no real warmth in it. “It _is_ tiring, isn’t it? To be the dissident voice. It will only get worse as you get older. But you knew that, didn’t you?”

“There is not anyone else.” Acknowledgement, agreement, and resolve all in one. Sunstorm pushed himself back to his pedes, squaring his shoulder struts again. “So I will do it, because I must.”

“Thundercracker’s conviction that he’s the only adult in the room is a lot funnier coming from someone your age. He always did want to teach…” Starscream trailed off, seemingly lost in memory. The brittleness from before had come over him again.

Sunstorm reached out carefully, claws retracted. He touched Starscream’s temple lightly, letting him twitch away slightly first, then spread his fingers to frame his face and brought his other hand up. Thumbs on the lines running down from his optics. Starscream looked puzzled, and skeptical, and the ashen remains of nervousness long since burnt out.

He couldn’t say _it’ll be all right,_ because that wasn’t true. He couldn’t say _I’ll fix it_ , because that was even less true. Instead, he said, “Trust me.”

“We’re both Decepticons,” Starscream pointed out, not so much a contradiction of his earlier statement as commentary.

“Yes.” Sunstorm stepped closer with the same care that he had first touched the mech with. Until he felt vents on his face and plating. He kept his hands gentle. “But I’m worthy of it.”

“I’m going to save our people. I’m going to bring peace. I’m going to rebuild. And anyone who tries to stop me, is going to regret it.” Sunstorm’s voice was low and passionate, the tone he usually reserved for his trinemates. “I’m an MTO and a seeker and an outlier and the Decepticon Air Commander. I’m your successor. Trust me.”

Starscream scoffed, but softly. “Idealistic newbuild.”

Sunstorm smiled. “We newbuilds can have more perspective at times. We know when it is time to let the old things go.”

Silence. Sunstorm waited patiently, cradling the other seeker’s face. Starscream hadn’t tried to shake him off at all.

“You’re going to feel very stupid if you don’t survive this,” Starscream said at last.

“That is probably fair,” Sunstorm acknowledged. “But I… _you_ are the reason why I was created.” He stopped, words not wanting to come. He wished, sometimes, that he had been made for the simple purpose of fighting someone else’s war. But in reality, he was the ‘lucky’ third spark that had accepted the frame and protoform Shockwave had engineered rather than guttering, made to be part weapon and part doll. He was _special_ , with all of the poisonous connotations that contained. And ‘Starscream’s successor’ was so unutterably better than ‘Shockwave’s project’ or ‘Megatron’s toy.’

“You _are_ really like this.” Starscream sounded resigned. “But I suppose you are what I have to work with. So. Listen, brat.” He dug azure talons into the reinforced armor of Sunstorm’s forearms. “If you disappoint me, I’ll make you wish you never thawed. Understand?”

Sunstorm met cutting red optics with his own gold and smiled at the challenge. “Yes.”

~

“He’s stable for now,” Flatline said, finally straightening up from bending over the repair table. His black and red plating was marked with drying energon and other fluids, splattering onto the floor when he shook his hands. He ordered, “Energon and fluid drips, and big dose of repair nanites. He’ll need them to integrate the spark chamber repairs.”

“He’ll be okay?” Skywarp asked, the tension in his frame and wings easing slightly. Icingdeath, who had replaced his trinemates as the procedure stretched out, stepped back and raised his hand to his audial as he commed someone.

“Too early to tell,” Flatline stated, walking over to the sinks to scrub down, “but that he survived the surgery is a good sign.”

Skywarp watched the junior medic unspool the tubing for the energon drip. The tray next to the repair bed was full of broken glass and shards of metal and puddles of internal fluids that had come off them. He risked a glance at the weld-marked frame of his trineleader on the table.

Sunstorm would need a Pit of a repaint, a new cockpit, and some replacement armor. But the worst of the damage was sealed over, his colors no longer indistinguishable under energon spatter. He didn’t look _good_ by any stretch of the imagination, but he wasn’t _dead_.

Relief made Skywarp lightheaded.

“Quit hanging around, you’re in the way,” Flatline said, wiping excess solvent off of himself. “You’ll get updates as I have them.” He made a shooing motion.

Icing tugged at his elbow, pulling the reluctant Skywarp in his wake. “You can see him when he wakes up,” the junior seeker said, guiding him out of the medbay with a hand on his wing.


End file.
